from the under-promise-and-over-deliver dept

One of the general rules for successful marketing is to under promise and over deliver, and the guys at Humble Bundle seem to keep doing that. While they've become famous for showing how cool bundles of digital products on a limited-time "pay what you want" basis can be a massive success, they keep doing really interesting things to tweak those experiments to show how you can "under promise and over deliver" in a way that encourages people to (happily) pay more and get more than they expect. From the beginning, they've used the charitable component (you can designate whatever portion of what you pay to go to charity) to get people to pay more -- something studies have shown works well to get people to pay higher amounts. They've also offered special products if you pay above the average price, which encourages people to both buy earlier, when the price may be lower, and to pay more, to get over the average to get the "special" extras. Finally, they consistently add awesome new products later on, while the Bundle is still going -- adding those extras automatically to everyone who already bought (encouraging people to buy early) or making them available to new buyers who pay above the average (again, pushing the amount people want to pay higher).

The Most Dangerous Game: A Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Collection by Zach Weiner

Of course, these are basically the three biggest names in webcomics, especially among the geekset who is probably already quite into Humble Bundle. It's yet another case of over delivering in a fun and exciting way.